Abstract
The literature on the distal demonstrativesein Old English has mainly concentrated on its use as a marker of definiteness (referent identifiability) and deixis. In this article, I focus instead on demonstrative uses that have received much less attention in previous work. Drawing on data fromBeowulf, I argue that the distal demonstrative determiner also serves a variety of discourse-pragmatic functions, such as indicating the relative importance of referents; topic continuity; or chapter boundaries.
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